Planet Hong Kong

Cinema of the Overdose

Reading the introduction to David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong is like reading a friend’s letter on a rarely seen but fondly remembered common acquaintance. I’ve landed in the old Hong Kong International Airport (not all that terrifying if you’re fond of rollercoasters); I’ve walked down Nathan Road with its countless flashing neons and rushing pedestrians and clacking traffic lights (for the benefit of the visually impaired: slow beat when red, rapid tattoo when green). I’ve seen the Cultural Centre, a graceful hulk of maroon bathroom tiles that always ends up as photo background for every just-married couple to walk out of the Civil Registry. And walking to the back of the Centre, I always pause and take in the view-- the one and only breathtaking panorama of Hong Kong harbor with its choppy waves, toy ferryboats bobbing up and down, glass-and-steel towers raking the bellies of clouds.

Oh and yes I too have eaten in Chungking Mansion. Cheap food, and quite good--recommend the roast duck on rice with hot broth on the side.

Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Johnnie To, Wai Ka-fai)

Crazy Rich A**hole

If we're talking lighthearted romantic fare involving insanely prosperous Asians I don't see why we need to go all the way to Hollywood when Hong Kong has been doing fine for years. 

Loving You (Mou mei san tamm, Johnnie To, 1995)

Bullet in the head

Back in the mid-90s found myself hooked on a particularly intense habit: Johnnie To movies. I'd seen A Hero Never Dies and The Barefoot Kid (his one period martial-arts film) had been digging through various DVDs ever since, hoping to find more. 

Found this: Loving You (Mou mei san taam, 1995) what To considers his first real directing job (he'd made his first feature in 1980; by the time he did this he had some sixteen films under his belt). A crime flick with an inordinate focus on a failing marriage, a marriage melodrama with a terrifically tense confrontation thirty minutes in--I mean how would you handle being pinned in an alleyway by a villain on a fire escape, gun pointed down at you? He'd already fired a shot at your head and in the confusion the bullet had somehow missed its mark. Then your nose starts bleeding. 

Manhunt (John Woo); Three (Johnnie To); Sky on Fire, Wild City (Ringo Lam)

Four by three

Playing catchup: in the everchanging landscape of World Cinema, what happened to Hong Kong's 'heroic bloodshed' movement--those action filmmakers who featured slow motion, balletic action sequences, guns pointed at each others' faces? 

Triangle; Shanghai Express; Morocco

Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To's Triangle is the kind of foolhardy enterprise we need more of--but no, I can't see Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola ever getting together to do a collaboration.

This is the next best thing--no, better; at least these three Chinese filmmakers don't suffer from the ravages of gigantism, of dealing with bloated budgets and self-inflicted angst and the ruinous need to be critically respected and commercially successful both; or, at least, they don't seem to show the strain of these pressures (at least one of them successfully balances the demands of all and sundry--is, possibly, the most successful filmmaker in Hong Kong at the moment). 

Ante's upped by the fact  that the three aren't doing three short films but a single film with three directors doing three sections--beginning, middle, end. Difficult to maintain consistency, even with the same editor and cinematographer, much less coherence (which doesn't really happen). 

Of the three I felt Tsui Hark was the least successful. He sets up the situation (to be fair, always the least rewarding task), about a trio of friends planning a heist. Hark has lost something--a zing, perhaps, a clarity and comic-book exuberance that was the hallmark of his Once Upon a Time in China series. Nowadays his action is incoherent, his photography muddled and ugly, his film's overall look and feel undistinctive and mean-spirited. It's not bad, exactly, but seems to resemble the kind of action flick any number of filmmakers--French or even Hollywood--might have made in the past ten years.

When they find the object of desire--a gold-plated armored breastplate--Ringo Lam takes over, and suddenly you're aware of a distinct auteurial presence. Lam was always the master of dark moods knotty relationships, understated drama, and--above all--urban suspense. There's a scene in an abandoned building involving handcuffs and a minivan that's a corker, and a vehicle run (strictly speaking it's not an actual chase) through the streets of Hong Kong that is brilliantly shot and edited, with a breathtakingly sudden climax. But then Lam, of course, is in charge of the middle act--he isn't allowed to end his sequence.

Suddenly suddenly things both simplify and complicate. In a series of economical moves the film jettisons most of the unnecessary plot elements (the pursuing triad, for one), adds its own (a scamming wheel-repair man with Tourette's (Lam Suet, an acting regular who cues you in on who owns this segment); a police officer on a bike). Suddenly the film becomes a dizzying shootout farce complicated beyond compare yet coherent as crystal, by turns funny and thrilling and poetic--sometimes all three at once.

Three filmmakers with three differing styles, doing a film on three friends, one of whom is involved in his own love triangle. It's an intricate stunt of a picture, one that doesn't quite come off successfully, but one applauds the attempt. Allez-oop!

Josef Von Sternberg's Shanghai Express is possibly a perfect film, all the more remarkable for being perfectly realized on a Hollywood studio backlot. The studio location probably helped enhance the sense of stylization, as Sternberg can micromanage every bit of Chinese calligraphy and spoken dialogue (accurate, as far as my limited Mandarin can tell--though I wonder about that clock face with Chinese numbers elaborately printed on its rim).

All in the service of its star, of course, the incomparable Marlene Dietrich, who here is lit and costumed and photographed (by Lee Garmes, with uncredited help from James Wong Howe) to within an inch of her life (to see the results of all this micromanagement, see photo above). Of all of Sternberg's effects, she's the most elaborate, most exotic effect of all: a hothouse German blossom in the provincial Far East, a woman without virtue who saves her honor for only one man, a world-weary cynic who dreams of an occasion to become the ultimate idealist.

Her co-star, Clive Brook, is unfortunately mostly a stiff upper lip; her true equal and an equally baroque grotesque is Warner Oland as Mr. Chang, a mysterious train passenger who as it turns out is a warlord, determined to exchange a valuable hostage for one of his captured officers. Oland skirts villanous oriental stereotype territory, but in Sternberg's hands he's a memorably villainous stereotype: when explaining to one victim what he intends to do to the poor man he runs a red-hot iron spike down a gauzy curtain, leaving behind a trail of softly burning cloth. It's the kind of casual touch that sends chills up the spines of the truly aware or, at least, reasonably alert.

That said, Sternberg's Chan does come out more fully rounded than one might expect--he tortures and punishes for reasons of pride (because he is humiliated, for example), and when he lusts after Dietrich it is with an effrontery us Asian types (in one of our more politically incorrect moods) want to cheer on.

Morocco I prefer for several reasons: the moment when Dietrich in tuxedo drag suddenly snatches a woman by the chin and busses her; the scenes where a simple mirror is occasion for extravagant demonstrations of cruelty and masochism; and the ending. Lee Garmes again does the sensuous cinematography, again with uncredited help by a legendary lenser (this time Lucien Ballard).

Gary Cooper is a far better match for Dietrich: where Brook was a stick in the mud, Cooper held his own with the kind of casual sexual confidence that makes one understand just what Dietrich saw in him (in Shanghai Express I kept expecting her to realize she really loved Chan all along).

As for the ending--the hypnotic pounding of drums; the wives and children, hopelessly and helplessly trailing after their soldier men; Dietrich, wind whipping at her dress and hair, a tall figure framed against a vast desert (think Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky). With the film's finale Sternberg reveals the film's (and his filmmaking's) true subject: passion--heedless, self-destructive, infinitely perverse. In his pictures each protagonist works out the terms of his or her particular obsession according to the unalterable laws of their twisted logic, losing themselves in that logic, ultimately destroying themselves and erasing themselves in the face of that logic. A great work.

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Battle Royale, Battle Royale 2, PTU, Triad Election

I've finally seen Battle rowaiaru (Battle Royale, Kinji Fukasaku, 2000), about a future Japan whose economy has collapsed, whose students have become delinquent, whose government has passed the 'Battle Royale' act (where high school classes are kidnapped and put on an island to try kill each other off), and it's shockingly bad. Not so much for the violence (Takeshi Kitano, who has a role in this picture, has depicted far more disturbing fare in his own films), as for the sentimentality, basically a bunch of high school kids keening over their best friends' corpses and confessing long-hidden crushes to each other--much more effective upchuck material than the various shootings, decapitations, and skewerings sprinkled throughout the picture.

More amusing are the various villains, sociopaths with generally better weaponry (they're armed at random--supposedly--from semiautomatic weapons to pot lids) who smile maniacally before murdering their fellow schoolmates. Most interesting of all is Kitano, a hunched sad sack of a man with a game show host manner (and in fact he may have been cast for that very reason) when either planting a knife in a former student's forehead, or explaining the rules of the game to his former class (the two main ones being: keep off the constantly shifting danger zones or the necklace around your neck explodes; kill each other off until one survivor is left or on the third day all necklaces explode, killing everyone). Kitano's character ultimately reveals himself to be more pathetic than everyone else and the biggest sentimentalist of all; the game (which doesn't make a lot of sense, when you think about it) less about control of the out-of-control younger generation (why the sadism? If it's meant to strike fear in their hearts, why keep it a secret?) than it is group therapy (with rather permanent results) for an emotionally repressed Japanese public.

Batoro rowaiaru ll: Chinkonka (Battle Royale 2: Requiem, Kinji and Kenta Fukasaku, 2003) is, if anything, even worse than the first movie. Yet another class is kidnapped (don't parents wise up to their kids disappearing on field trips?) and their assignment is to assault an island being defended by the survivor of the first picture, now the head of a terrorist group.

The rules make even less sense (why are they still bothering with danger zones? And what's all this nonsense about pairing them off such that if one dies, the other dies too? Don't they want the terrorists group eliminated?); the battle sequences are directly lifted from Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998); the sentimentality is stickier than ever. Worse of all, they've replaced Kitano with some nondescript character who would rather chew scenery than anything else (he tries too hard to be scary, and the results are more laughable than menacing).

Johnnie To's PTU (2003), about one night in the life of a police tactical unit, should go wrong in so many ways it generates its own kind of suspense--how long can one go without an actual shootout? How many clichés (from the cop's stolen gun to the hostile officer from a brother agency to the furious gang lord seeking revenge for the death of his son) can be introduced and given To's unique spin on the matter, a combination of cynical visual wit and sharp behavioral observation (he's like one of those Chinese acrobats with fifteen plates whirring in the air at once)? And how much style can To generate to sustain our interest for a full ninety minutes?

One might call this an expansion of the paper ball soccer game in To's Cheung fo (The Mission, 1999), where To and his characters seem to be riffing to pass the time, only the calm is deceptive (I can't help but feel that Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985) is also an inspiration--a film about a night spent in Soho that's really a night spent in Hell). Turns out the faint air of corruption hanging in the streets (the affairs of triad and police officers are uncomfortably intertwined) affects everyone, infects everyone, moves them and motivates them in a thousand little ways; by the end of the picture very little has happened, yet somehow everything has changed. Excellent 'action' film, where the tension is in the anticipation of violence, not its actual realization.

And finally there's Johnnie To's Hak se wui yi wo wai kwai (Triad Election, 2006), the sequel to his previous film, where To pretty much realizes his ambition to create a Godfather like epic set in Hong Kong.

The sequel occurs three years later, when yet another election for the new triad chairman of the Wo Shing Society (the oldest and biggest in Hong Kong, operating in the Tsim Sha Tsui district) rolls around; this time Lok (Simon Yam) wants to stay in power (sounds familiar, anyone?) and is up against one of his rising lieutenants, Jimmy Lee (Louis Koo). Lok's lines sound tired now (he tells each of his prospective candidates that they will be the next chairman, they have his support), presumably from the strain of managing his empire, and from the guilt of watching his son fall into gang influence (one wonders if the boy hadn't been seriously traumatized by past events). Jimmy, however, has his own drama: he wants to go legitimate, and establish a substantial foothold (in his case a gigantic housing and business development) in mainland China (every American corporation's wet dream, incidentally, at least before the recent crisis; nowadays their immediate goal is to stay above water).

To's style here is I'd say subtler, quieter, more haunting--he's capable of images that stay with you for days (maybe the rest of your life): a closeup of Jimmy's face as his boat glides slowly, silently away from another (where a man is being prepared for a watery burial); a shot in profile and without sound of unspeakable things being done to a bound man in a dog kennel; a shot of Jet (Nick Cheung) coming out of nowhere and running for his life from a gang of thugs wielding meat cleavers (again as in the first no guns are used, and the resulting violence is considerably more gruesome)--how and why we don't know, and never find out.

Yam's Lok was the magnetic central figure in the first film; Koo's Jimmy is no less compelling. He's a businessman, first and foremost, and in the beginning, standing on a high hill viewing the vast fields he intends to transform, the imagery is almost biblical--Christ on a mountaintop, being offered the world. To gives us hints of what goes on in Koo's mind, how the various frustrations and obstacles before him aggravate his stubborn determination to scheme, deal, hack, kill his way to his goal. When at one point he suddenly stands up and takes matters literally in his own hands, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck--not because I was seeing a psychopath losing control but because I was seeing a driven man, a man who could very well be myself, the pressure of time and need and money forcing his arm into action.

It's a subtle, near-subliminal performance worthy of comparison to Al Pacino's in The Godfather Part 2, and it's to To's credit that he lets Koo's mask of cool slip only twice: first in a horrific torture sequence straight out of--well, I'm not sure what exactly inspired it, but I wonder if To's action-film contemporaries (Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, John Woo) are capable of thinking up such acts (Danny Lee, maybe). The second is, if anything, even more horrific--a demonstration of power and its application so absolute it leaves you with jaw dropped, hands clutching armrests--yes, Jimmy's dreams are realized (we even have the obligatory scene of the happy man hugging his expectant wife), but at what cost? A great film, I think, this and its predecessor; possibly the two together represent To's most ambitious work to date--even his masterpiece.

Wanted, Effi Briest, Shall We Dance? Exiled, Election

Wanted (2008) is absurd; yes, the filmmaker (one Timur Bekmambetov, who directed the fitfully entertaining Nochnoy Dozor (Nightwatch, 2004)) in all likeliness wanted it that way, but there's intentionally and well-controlled silliness, and then there's the suspicion that the director hasn't any idea what he's doing. So what's the scientific rationale for curving bullets--telekinesis? Angelina Jolie's magnetic personality (don't you dare shoot me, you relative unknown of a lead actor)? And in that scene where one car uses another as a ramp to flip over and fire into a bulletproof limo's open sunroof, why would a billionaire paranoid enough to install bulletproof windows in his vehicle leave the sunroof wide open?

But that's small change (about as significant as shooting the wings off a fly). Maybe my biggest problem with the movie--along with the huge dose of "I so don't care" that I felt watching it--is the fact that I'd seen this done before, only better. Mario O'Hara's Bagong Hari (The New King) also told the story of an expert killer hired to do a job that turns out to be of great significance, only O'Hara did it earlier, in 1986.

Granted this might be a classic premise that's been done to death over the years (The Manchurian Candidate, anyone?)--comparing the two, one finds that O'Hara's picture tells its surprisingly complex story (aside from the basic plot there's an election going on, and a vast power struggle to put various candidates in office) with a minimum of fuss: no fast cutting, no shaky-cams, no CGI to hide flaws or plot loopholes or actors who can't really fight. O'Hara takes the classic action sequence style of Ford and Kurosawa (a combination of medium and long shots carefully edited together to leave the fight choreography intact) as passed on by Gerardo de Leon to every subsequent Filipino filmmaker, and yoked it to an epic noir fantasy that's careful to stay rooted to its milieu. In fact, the film operates as a kind of parallel universe that, with a bit of exaggeration, can pass for Metro Manila of 1986 (or: the Philippines under the increasingly desperate, increasingly uncertain grip of the Marcos dictatorship). If Bagong Hari, like Wanted, has delusions of grandeur, I much prefer the former's delusions--it approaches its ambitions in a more persuasive manner, using cruder effects on a far smaller production budget.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Effi Briest... (1974) is unusual not only for having one of the longest titles in world cinema (the full title is Fontane - Effi Briest oder: Viele, die eine Ahnung haben von ihren Möglichkeiten und Bedürfnissen und dennoch das herrschende System in ihrem Kopf akzeptieren durch ihre Taten und es somit festigen und durchaus bestätigen) but for being a book Fassbinder loved so much what he has done with the adaptation is nothing less than an attempt at translating the text to the film screen, in as comprehensive a manner as possible, and still be able to call it a film.

Huge swathes of text are displayed onscreen; Fassbinder himself narrates long passages that piece together and at times comment on the onscreen action. The connection between word and image may on occasion rival in complexity what Robert Bresson has tried in his adaptations--I'm thinking of the long tracking shot where Fassbinder's lenses follow Effi (Hanna Schygulla, in a perfectly controlled performance) while Fassbinder describes an episode of great emotional turmoil, full of weeping and guilt and shame--but "not properly, and not enough," or so Effi tells herself, and us. One watches her stride across the screen with the same fascination one watches a car-crash survivor, or rape victim--you look for signs of what happened on her face, interpret what few clues you see to support the theory you happen to be entertaining at the moment (she's upset; no, she's unhappy; no, she's tired). Instead of tired melodrama (the tears, the yelling), Fassbinder presents a strolling enigma; the passage quoted becomes, as a result, unforgettable.

It's tempting to call Fassbinder's adaptation an illuminated manuscript, complete with miniature illustrations lined with silver (the mirror images that occur throughout the film). Of course Fassbinder planned to save money using these techniques, but he's also turned a quite serious limit on resources into a unique (even amongst his own pictures) filmmaking style. A great film.

Looking at Masayuki Suo's Shall we dansu? (Shall We Dance? 1996) and it seems crazier than ever that they would have thought of doing an American remake, even with Hollywood stars. The whole psychology is wrong--Americans are often comfortable about impulsive acts such as joining a dancing school; they're all about taking themselves out of a rut and seizing the day (at least in movies they are). It's funnier that a Japanese salaryman should step off his subway ride and indulge in the shameful act of ballroom dancing; it's like watching a bunch of secret cultists indulge in kinky sexual rituals--even more embarrassing, I submit, since at least with kinky sex there's some primeval drive behind it that you can easily understand, perhaps sympathize with. Dancing is a near-incomprehensible urge, and Suo's achievement is in giving us the form and flavor of the act's hidden pull, its subterranean appeal. When Mr. Aoki (Naoto Takenaka, who's wonderful) executes a sudden left turn with barely hidden glee in his face, it's as if a child were acting out some shared, secret joke--we know without being told that he's one of them, and we should watch out for him in the future.

The DVD includes a trailer of the remake, and the remake's version of the hilarious scene where Mr. Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) and Mr. Aoki are caught in the men's room, in a clinch. In the 2004 remake Peter Chelsom shoots Richard Gere and his partner head-on, with the men's room door directly behind them. Anyone who enters will immediately see the two, so when the door opens, the partner has no choice but to collapse immediately, causing a flurry of distress and worry.

Suo's timing is much more confident. We see Sugiyama and Aoki on the left side, the urinals on the right. A fellow office worker walks past the couple looking straight at the urinals (which is plausible--men tend not to look at other men in public bathrooms), giving us this single awful second where the two are locked in a frozen embrace while their colleague unzips his pants. It's when it starts to register on the colleague that something odd's going on that Aoki is struck with the inspiration to faint--what makes the scene isn't Aoki's brainstorm, but that jawdropping pause between sidelong observation, eventual realization, and brilliant improvisation.

Looked at Johnnie To's Fong juk (Exiled, 2006) again, and the setpieces are still breathtaking, the colors striking, the moments of male bonding moving and funny and comforting, in the way French fries done with passion and style are comforting.

Hak se wui (Election, 2005) is a more substantial proposition (To admits he did Fong juk to take a break from the effort of making this picture and its sequel)--if one didn't know any better (and who's to say for certain if one does or doesn't?), one might imagine that the film is To's satire on elections, maybe the previous year's Hong Kong legislative or even American presidential race, with an ambitious if abrasive Big D (Tony Leung Ka-Fai as John Kerry?) taking on the more likeable, more establishment Lok (Simon Yam as George Bush?) in a contest for the chairmanship of the Wo Society Triad.

The movie is really all about the smoky rooms in which elderly men drink tea and conduct deals and negotiations--To seems to be saying that the difference between political parties and crime organizations is slim, which is hardly news (Coppola said as much decades back, only his accusation was leveled at large families and American corporations ). What's interesting is how thoroughly To covers the process by which power is transferred--not just what's explicitly debated and brought to a compromise, but even suggesting what isn't (you suspect, after all is said and done, that Lok had the elections sewn up and in his pocket long before Big D made up his mind to run for the position), and how this affects everything and everyone.

Emblematic of the whole film is the scene where Big D and his men stand on a high rock, dropping boxes down the steep hillside. Innocuous enough image (if at first glance puzzling), innocuously staged and shot with long lenses, until you eventually realize what's in those boxes. The horror and violence is there all the time, hidden by a latticework of wood, and the appearance of banal normalcy.

There's a subplot about a stolen Dragon's Head Baton, symbolizing the chairman's power, and later a few violent rubouts, but they're window dressing, meant to keep you keyed-up and interested; the meat of the film is in the process by which Lok tries to finagle his way into the top position.

It's difficult material--makes Mou gaan daou (Infernal Affairs, 2002) look straightforward by comparison. In an interview To admits he sat on his usual visual pyrotechnics while telling the first half of the story, to keep the plot front and center and coherent. But To can't help pulling off the occasional coup de cinema--the aforementioned hilltop scene, for one; for another, the scene of the various Triad heads locked away, and To's camera in yet another long shot watching them in their cells, side-by-side, an image and comic effect I'm thinking might have been inspired from Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) (the people are like animals in a zoo reacting to their isolation and impotence--in To's film they yell and raise fists; in Tati's they watch television).

David Bordwell cites Cheung fo (The Mission, 1999) as his favorite To, and I understand the choice; the film for its innovative style and sheer cinemaness may be To's masterpiece. But in terms of breadth of theme and depth of treatment, in terms of capturing a crucial element in not just Triad but Chinese culture (again, referring to To's interview, these crime organizations have apparently existed for four centuries) at a specific point of time (the 2004 Hong Kong legislative elections), of commenting in a sophisticated way not only on Triad power struggles but on power struggles in general, of unfolding a complex plot within a complex milieu, one might say that this is To's (and Hong Kong cinema's) The Godfather--a film with considerable commercial and artistic impact, well-told (isn't it strange that a director noted for his wordless action sequences is capable of a film so dense with (yet deft in its handling of) dialogue (with, of course, scenes that turn the tendency memorably on its head)?).

There are moments here that recall Coppola's epic, but with their own spin--the endless tea drinking, of course (healthier I suppose, especially in large doses, than the drinking of Italian wines); the large parties (here--and this I think was brilliant--the aftermath of a party that ended up being canceled); the glance and shout a father gives his son--throwing him the car keys and counting on him in that one gesture not only to understand what's happening, but to actively participate and block off all means of escape (it's like the entire subplot between Michael Corleone and his father collapsed into one electric moment).

But it's not just Coppola being referenced here; the immediacy, the camerawork, the often profane, often comical male camaraderie recalls Martin Scorsese's gangster pictures: Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino. One might say To's attempting to tell a Coppola-sized story through Scorsese techniques--all filtered through his unique Hong Kong-based sensibilities. Excellent, perhaps great film.

Jeonju 9: Artavazd Peleshian, Johnnie To's 'Exiled'

(Post re-edited, 9.10 am, 5/10/07)

Artavazd Peleshian's films mostly run not longer than ten to thirty minutes, the longest (Mer dare (Our Century, 1983)) going on for almost an hour. They're what he (describing his Vremena goda (The Four Seasons, 1975)) calls a "cardiogram of the national soul and character" of Armenia, his native land.

He's considered the inventor of distance montage--what that is, I'm not quite sure, though I've googled it a little. Judy Bloch, writing for the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, calls it a "counterpoint over time of images and sounds," claiming it creates "rhythms and moods his predecessors (Vertov, Eisenstein) never attempted." Gregory Pearse and Maria Wagner in cinemaseekers notes that he's often categorized as an "experimental documentary" filmmaker, but seem to subscribe more to fellow Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov's view that he's "one of the few authentic geniuses of cinema;" that his cinema--or the cinema he creates by means of distance montage--is really "built entirely on the intuitive association between the images." In short, "it utilizes the ability of the spirit to "understand" reality instead of the ability of the brain/intellect."

Asking Peleshian himself doesn't seem any more helpful; his answers are as maddeningly vague. "In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don't mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning."

Mm-hmm, yep, sure; now I get it. The JIFF catalogue describes it as "A piece of montage. There is no meaning of pieces; it has a full meaning only when each scene is put together," which seems to take off (however awkwardly) from what Peleshian himself is saying. So it's with this headful of confused and contradictory notions that I sat down (with Mr. Peleshian and his wife some rows behind me) to watch some of his films.

Obitateli (Inhabitants, 1970) intercuts footage of birds taking flight--thousands of them spreading their wings across the screen in such a woosh! of air you want to cover yourself--with huge closeups of caged animals (you catch glimpses of bars here, there), wet, dark eyes staring straight at the lens; the contrast between freed and incarcerated creatures is striking, dramatic. Vremena goda (Four Seasons, 1975), his first to eschew archival footage in favor of footage shot by his cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov, opens with a shepherd in a raging river, struggling to keep hold of his sheep; the rest of the film continues its downward plunge with more shepherds sliding down cliff faces with more sheep, farmers dragging huge haystacks down alarming inclines, and so on. The sense of hurtling motion, of life unstoppable, of energy and will pulling and shoving forward and down is overwhelming. Peleshian scores the whole thing to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, of course (with additional use of Armenian folk music); I can't imagine anything else will do.

Kyanq (Life, 1993) is one of his simplest, his first and only one in color, and easily his most moving--a record of a childbirth. A lesser filmmaker would train his camera downwards, below the waist, and chronicle the child's passage out the birth canal; Peleshian focuses his lens on the mother's face, on her suffering and pain, with a heartbeat (hers?) pulsing on the soundtrack. To call it a great performance would be to cheapen it, demean it; it's simply a mother giving birth, no more, no less, and half the art (I think) is in Peleshian recognizing that in her face is the source of the film's true power.

Verj (End, 1992) is often (and it would be appropriate) called his last film (on this point things get confusing--both the JIFF catalogue and some websites say it isn't (that would be Kyanq), imdb.com says it is). The film's almost as simple as Kyanq: a train rushing through a tunnel, and in the distance is the suggestion--the merest hint--of a light. The finale is inevitable, almost superfluous, but Peleshian builds up to so much tension--with engine roar and whistle shriek and tiny blob of light--that when it finally comes, it's a stunning epiphany.

I can almost see what people mean when they say what they say; it is an intuitive cinema. Peleshian connects images together but not in a logical or narrative sense--beyond narrative? Supra logical? For want of a better term one might have to settle on the word "spiritual." The separate shots cohere and gain full meaning when the puzzle pieces are in place, and the picture is seen whole (think Susan Alexander and her endless puzzles--or, if you will, the structure of Kane itself). What's missing from these and other explanations, really, is what's missing when you get up to leave, that little je ne sais quoi that spells the difference between talking about the film and experiencing it, and it's on that difference, I think, that most of us founder when trying to talk about what Peleshian has done.

What I can say about his films is that there's a grandeur, a magnificence that doesn't put itself above its subject--no, it's clear that despite the amplitude or magnification of motion, size, intensity, Peleshian's sympathies are with what he's shooting. He doesn't assume the godlike viewpoint, though there are qualities of that in his imagery (thanks to the use of telephoto lenses--"for candid shots" as he puts it), but by avoiding voiceover narration, by refusing to pronounce judgement on them, by instead depending on music, or an accepting silence, he, well, exalts the images, lends to them a more intense appreciation ('Exalt?' 'Godlike?' Is it possible that religious connotations are unavoidable, perhaps should even be embraced?). Not many novelists can do that--I can think of Tolstoy, maybe, and parts of Hugo; not many filmmakers too--oh, Renoir comes to mind, as well as Welles, Ozu, Mario O'Hara.

And that was that. The house lights came up. I saw Mr. Peleshian, leaning on his wife, glumly making his way to the exit. I had to do it; I put out my hand--"I enjoyed your films very much, sir!" He shook hands, smiled briefly and nodded, and left. Feeble tribute, I know, but as I've been trying to say all along, it was hard--impossible, maybe--to put it all in words.


Johnnie To's Fong juk (Exiled, 2006) is easily the most fun I've had of any film in the festival--but I've always been partial to To; he's a more dependable storyteller than John Woo, a more intense dramatist than Tsui Hark, and a wilder fabulist than the low-key Ringo Lam. I've always thought he'd be the shoo-in for a Hollywood career, and wondered why he's never taken the plunge, unlike his filmmaking brothers.

In the letter To wrote for the JIFF's closing ceremonies, he had said he wanted to "relax, make a fun film" and I think it shows; unlike the grimly realistic Hak se wui (Election) films this one is almost all bombast and romanticism, Sergio Leone style; it even has some of the European architectural motifs you'd catch in the corner of your eye in Leone's work (the film was shot in Macau, and makes full use of the exotic Chinese-Portugese ambience), some of his sweeping camera moves (a character doesn't just walk into a room, he glides into it, with the camera as his magic carpet), and of course the harmonica (you almost expect to spot Charles Bronson hidden away in the shadows with his legs crossed).

The spirit may be Leone, but the plot is almost pure Peckinpah--the criminals past their prime, the hunt by a higher power, the desperate heist, the heroic turnaround and rescue--all are there. If you ever wondered what The Wild Bunch might have looked like if Leone had directed, wonder no more; To has done it on behalf of both legends.

The film's self-referential nature isn't as annoying as if, say, Quentin Tarantino does it; with Tarantino, you get all references and little else (well, a mysognistic, rather sophomoric sense of humor, I suppose). With To you get style, and the smarts to play the references with or against that style. Hence the climactic shootout--you go in primed by all the parallels to The Wild Bunch expecting a grand bloodbath, in slow motion; To plays it the other way, perversely, almost tosses the whole thing off one shoulder, and focuses on two details: the fate of a wife and child (strange, how Hong Kong cinema is so much like Filipino cinema in that respect--the survival of the family being of prime interest), and the development of an instant photo. It might be argued that this is what the film really is about, actually--the collecting or gathering together of photos for an album filled with unforgettable memories. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.